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Am I missing something, or bug? Tariffs

I am a relatively new V2 player so I am unsure if this is a bug, or due to my lack of experience a mistake I am making.

I started out as Dai Nam and things have been going alright so far, however after some time my income from tariffs drops to 0, for no explicable reason. It stays there for (what I tested to be) at least 2 years before I quit out of confusion. I assume I am missing something here entirely, but I have attached the save BEFORE this happens (if you run it at 5 speed it should happen within a month or two).

You buy goods from the world market for three reasons:
* Your Pops having the purchasing power to do so and items are not produced within your internal market (including your spheres or who has sphered you)
* Your factories need non-local goods
* Your military needs non-local goods

I suspect you are able to purchase all of your needs locally and any needs you need from overseas you don't have the cash to purchase.

I am in the UK's sphere, so I guess that's what is screwing me over (as I have no factories and my military isn't very large to be major factor here). Granted I was fairly certain I had been for a very long time in their sphere already and my taxes across the board are set to min, so I don't think my pop can't afford it either. Losing 100 a month income hurts (even though I have a ~20k reserve saved up, that won't last long). Any advice on how to move forward from here?

It's better to tax rich and poor POPs at a high rate, as your tax efficiency is low, meaning their income won't be as badly affected as you might think, but also because tariffs are essentially a tax on artisan production, which is the engine of any unciv economy.

You can also afford to tax the middle classes somewhat, use tariffs a little, as well as bring down your stockpile in peacetime (provided your economy is not heavily geared towards military production) and military spending in emergencies to very low levels. Disband your navy as well, as that eats up more money than you might think. If it's still going bad, restart, and use tariffs sparingly.

That's the thing, I lose 100% of the tariffs after the crash. Any setting (even incentives) do not change tariffs cost/income (as I assume 0 outside trade is happening). Dai Nam doesn't start with a navy (nor did I gear it towards that). Without extremly drastic cutbacks on education and administration I won't be able to break even. Sounds more and more like I will have to restart. A shame but I expected something would kill me on my first game.

Being in SOI eliminates all tariffs inside it (and the UK sphere can certainly buy and provide everything, thus no need to access WM where you would get tariffs). "The crash" happened when you were added to UK sphere.

Maintain 0 relations with the UK to make them gain influence slower.
GPs are also unlikely to sphere anyone with 0% westernization progress (save all RPs to complete 100% civ. progress on one go).

Saving money includes turning national stockpile to 0%, cutting off manually buying of convoys, artillery and canned food. This way you can keep 0 cost navy (which of course regains no org after losing it). When building, reactivate buying of those supplies. The moment they start to build cut all off again. This way I was able to keep five Man of Wars as Johore and dominate East Asia vs. Netherlands.